The intense competition in the healthcare industry is triggering unprecedented benefits to the patient fraternity. While the quality of medical care has improved by leaps and bounds, patients now, have choices and alternatives just in case they feel deterioration in the perceived level of medical care. This sudden shift in favor of patients means physicians will now have to devise ways in not just attracting patients but also retaining.

One of the prime factors in patient-retention has always been the quality of medical care. However, with most of the physician practices conforming to the benchmarks in quality, support services are emerging as differentiators. Therefore, as much as keeping their quality of medical care unblemished, physicians will need to engage their patients with complementary services throughout their stay at the facilities. Consequently, a full-pledged and competent support staff becomes inevitable in complementing physicians’ efforts to promote retention and engagement of patients. Amongst chores of clinical and operational duties that these support staff attend, following are deemed more pertinent to the objective of patient engagement and retention:

Scheduling an appointment: Patients often feel it difficult to schedule an appointment with their doctors owing to doctor’s busy schedule. While it may be true that doctors are always pre-occupied with some medical emergency or the other, yet it is the duty of the support staff to accommodate slots so that patient need not go disappointed with not having to schedule an appointment with the doctor/s they feel more secure with.

Making their stay comfortable: Patients often complain of support services during their stay in the medical facilities. This will have a serious impact on patients’ decision to come back again. Therefore, support staff, along with administering clinical duties as per doctor’s advice, should also make patients feel at home.

Follow up on the progress post discharge: Most physician support staff deems it complete once the patients are discharged from the facility. But, medical care concern goes beyond that; patients will be happy if they are enquired of the progress post discharge. Moreover, it kind of restores their faith in the medical facility from which they had derived medical care.

Physicians would not have been concerned if they had only to assign these services as part of their endeavor to engage and retain patients. But, the fact that most of the support staff’s energy is spent on billing and negotiating claims with insurance companies, there is a likelihood of adverse impact on physicians’ main objective of patient engagement and retention to augment dwindling practice revenues. The thought of expanding the base of support staff to augment medical billing too is losing its relevance owing to heavy implementation cost associated with mandatory EHR, and the ensuing ICD-10 & HIPAA 5010 compliant clinical and operational practices.

In such a scenario, physicians would do well to entrust their support staff with only clinical functions, and outsource medical billing, and Revenue Cycle Management (RCM) services from competent and credible sources. Medicalbillersandcoders.com – being the largest consortium of medical billers and coders in the U.S – is resource-rich in dispensing valued-added services in medical billing and RCM. Its comprehensive suite of medical billing and RCM – comprising patient scheduling and reminders, patient enrollment, insurance enrollment, insurance verification, insurance authorizations, coding and audits, billing and reconciling of accounts, account analysis and denial management, A/R management, and financial management reporting – is ample proof of its competence.

As the insurance reimbursement environment becomes increasingly stringent, the incidence of denials, delays, underpayments, and lost or ignored claims seems to be on the rise. Consider this interesting statistics compiled by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS: 70% of claims are paid the first time they are submitted; 30% of claims are either denied (20%) or lost or ignored (10%); 60% of denied, lost or ignored claims will never be resubmitted; 18% of claims will never be collected. Therefore, it is obvious that physicians are losing a substantial portion of their reimbursements unable to keep pace with medical billing challenges. But it is not a thing that can be neglected as medical reimbursements happens to be the life-line of medical practices. While it is certain that the dwindling reimbursement rates are the resultant of inadequate medical billing and RCM practices, it is also true that physicians have not been fully responsive to web-based medical billing and practice management software, which are deemed to be far superior to manual billing practices. The fact that physicians can expect today’s medical billing technology to adapt to situational demands of medical billing reimbursements makes these web-based medical billing and practice management software indispensable to resurrect the dwindling reimbursements, which on an average aggregate to $125 billion yearly. The first step in claim realization begins with accurate coding without scope for denials. Therefore it is imperative that physicians’ medical billing is intuitive enough to forecast and adapt in such way that would negate the chance of denial. But, because billing staff’s ability is limited, billing software with proactive rules engine has become more reliable. The significant thing about proactive rule engine is that it can automatically identify claims that are likely to be denied and correct them before being submitted for claims. Consequently, you can expect an increase in first pass resolution rate, acceleration of claim realization, and considerable reduction in workload for your in-house staff. It is strange yet true that practices are reimbursed far below than what they are entitled for. Moreover, the reimbursements tend to be different despite the procedure being the same. While these discrepancies in reimbursements rates may emanate from payer contracts, it is highly unlikely that physicians will be able to figure exactly which payer contract is yielding underpayment. Fortunately, they can turn to software that can automatically compare the actual payments received with the payments specified in each payer contract, and alerting them when discrepancies occur. Such software module that is capable of tracking discrepancies in reimbursements will eventually augment collection rates, promote physicians’ efficiency and growth, and make accurate financial prediction. The efficiency of claim realization has always hinged on how best physicians handle A/R Management. Time factor is the crucial thing in A/R Management: less time your claims stay in A/R bracket, better your practices’ financial health. But, of late physicians have been complaining of their A/Rs consuming more than the admissible time limit of 90 days and eventually ending up as bad debts. Therefore, it is imperative that physicians respond to the challenges in A/R management through seamless integration of claim generation, submission, follow-up, and remediation. Electronic medical billing – built on sound Practice Management systems – promotes harmonious integration of claim generation, submission, follow-up, and remediation aimed at speeding up the Account Receivable Cycle. While physicians contemplate on turning around their practices’ revenues with new found technological platform (electronic medical billing), cost and method of installation may be matter of immediate concern. Assistance from a medical billing service to help install an electronic billing system integrating with the areas most required by the practice and handle the A/R will help improve collections. Medicalbillersandcoders.com – by virtue of being credible, competent, and self-sufficient in offering cost-effective – comes across as a leading name. Its strategic partnership with leading PMS and EHR vendors lends its medical billing services the technological edge.

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Medical Billers and Coders is the largest consortium of Medical Billers and Coders in the United States. Our aim is to help the physician community to reach the right expertise in the right location at the right time.